DevConf.us 2019 is the 2nd annual, free, Red Hat sponsored technology conference for community project and professional contributors to Free and Open Source technologies held at the Boston University in the historic city of Boston, USA.
When: Thursday, August 15 to Saturday, August 17, 2018
Elegant solutions often synthesize known facts with a small amount of new effort. To date, we've struggled to get computing machines involved in much elegant problem solving. Considering constraints like budget caps and the polar ice caps, this lack of elegance becomes more than an aesthetic issue.
In this talk I'll present ASC and SEUSS, two systems designed to reduce this new effort. ASC, a Harvard/BU collaboration, attempts to auto-parallelize single threaded workloads, reducing new effort required from programmers to achieve wall clock speedup.
SEUSS is custom operating system we spliced into the backend of a high throughput distributed Serverless platform, Apache OpenWhisk. SEUSS uses an alternative isolation mechanism to containers, Library Operating Systems (LibOSs). LibOSs enable a lightweight snapshotting technique. Snapshotting LibOSs enables two counterintuitive results: 1) although LibOSs inherently replicate system state, SEUSS can cache multiplicatively more functions on a node; 2) although LibOSs can suffer bad ""first run"" performance, SEUSS is able to reduce cold start times by orders of magnitude. By increasing sharing and decreasing deterministic bringup, SEUSS radically reduces the amount of hardware and cycles required to run a FaaS platform.
